[LINK] Viral Internet marketing campaigns by companies

[Tom Worthington]

I had thought that advertisements for male enlargement products were
confined to spammers. But the international electronics company
Philips are promoting their electric hair clippers to men for "Achieving
the Optical Inch". A video for this entitled "Bonsai" was created for 
Philips by advertising company Tribal DDB, 5 May 2010: 
<http://video.acpmagazines.com.au/fhm/004_Bonsai.flv>.

This is a term I was not familiar with, it is not in the Wikipedia and I
only found about 2,000 uses of it on the web (most apparently related to
Philips promotions). I finally found it in the Urban Dictionary:
<http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=optical%20inch>.

Philips avoid using such terms directly on their own website and do not 
mention their products in the video produced, but hint at
it on the more coyly named: "Shave Everywhere" web site:
<http://www.shaveeverywhere.com/>.

There would appear to be enough material for a whole PHD on viral
marketing in this one campaign by Philips. The company puts its name on 
the top of the web site, whereas some Australian beer companies have 
been more reluctant to directly associate themselves with web based 
promotions, some of which use games to promote beer drinking and so may 
appeal to children.

Curious to see how popular the "Achieving the Optical Inch" term might 
be, I blogged the phrase:
<http://blog.tomw.net.au/2010/12/achieving-optical-inch.html> and set up 
an Amazon.com store:
<http://astore.amazon.com/optical-inch-20>. I will let you know if sales 
take off as a result. ;-)


-- 
Tom Worthington FACS CP HLM, TomW Communications Pty Ltd. t: 0419496150
PO Box 13, Belconnen ACT 2617, Australia  http://www.tomw.net.au
Adjunct Senior Lecturer, School of Computer Science, The
Australian National University http://cs.anu.edu.au/courses/COMP7310/
Visiting Scientist, CSIRO ICT Centre: http://bit.ly/csiro_ict_canberra